Another Amusing Google Search: “How to Get into Stanford”

Once again, I’ve made it to the top of an interesting Google search: if you search for “getting into Stanford,” one of the top list of results is my 2005 post on How to Get into Stanford. Makes sense, given the handful emails I’ve gotten from prospective students asking for tips, especially from an alumna. I always point people to the Undergraduate Admissions website and especially to the very helpful FAQ, but I hope my post gives people some helpful advice.

(And of course, I’m still one of the top hits for “ragtotes.” w00t!)

Job Spam

I get a lot of job spam– unsolicited emails asking me to submit my resume and/or apply for jobs. Most of these emails are from recruiting or head hunting firms and almost always, they concern positions that I’m not interested in at all (and usually have little to do with my professional experience and career history). They usually say something like “We came across your resume and based on your background and experience, we have some job opportunities you may be interested in.” They then describe some of the available positions (usually at one or more corporate clients of the recruiting/hiring firm) and immediately follow that up with “Please submit your resume” or “Apply online at [insert some website].” I assume that these recruiting firms are sending these emails to thousands of people (basically, anybody who might be in any minuscule way a good fit). Although seemingly inefficient, they only need a small fraction of these people to respond so that they can sift through applications and provide their clients with a manageable pool of applicants to review. This is basically the same principal as regular spam as well as telemarketing and even political pooling– contact thousands, millions of people and even if you only get one or two percent return, that’s a sizable number of respondents and potential new customers.

Yet, the thing that actually annoys me about these emails is that they contacted me, but their emails come off as if it was the other way around, telling me how to pursue them. “Send us your resume.” “Apply here.” They are interested in me based on my background, experience and qualifications, but then I’m supposed to go to the trouble of applying or submitting my resume (which they already have since that’s how they found me in the first place). It’s like going up to someone and saying, “I really think you’re attractive and interesting. I think you’d be interested in going out with me. Here’s my number– please call me and I’ll consider a date.” I’m not saying that they should automatically make me a job offer or even guarantee me an interview, but they contacted me– a better approach would be, “We came across your resume and think you would be a good fit for some job opportunities at [insert company]. We would like to talk to you further if you are interested,” etc. From my experience, only a handful of recruiters do this and they’re usually internal recruiters from the company. In the end, I may not be interested, a good fit, or even qualified, but if they’re reaching out to random people on job websites and the web in general, they’re looking for more and/or better candidates than those contacting them and even the semblance of trying to “woo” the applicant wouldn’t hurt.

However, an interesting thing happened today, which is why I’m bothering to write about it at all. I received another one of these unsolicited recruiting emails today, but after receiving the message, it was quickly followed by another email from the same company (but different recruiter) and even with the same subject line that started with the following sentence:

While conducting an online search we came across your resume. It appears that you are over qualified for our positions.

Ha! They go on to mention executive positions posted by their clients that may be more applicable. They still end up telling me to submit my resume (”for free”), but it’s a start!

The Stanford Copyright Integrity Initiative

If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I’ve commented often on file-sharing, copyright, and universities certainly more than a few times and while my blogging has been sparse lately, today’s announcement of “The Stanford Copyright Integrity Initiative” deserved spending some time on a blog post. The initiative was apparently “introduced by Stanford University to demonstrate the university’s leadership in efforts to strengthen the integrity of copyrights and intellectual property.” As early as a little before 10am this morning, my department (Student Computing/Residential Computing) received an email from a worried student– after reading the announcement on the front page of The Daily, the University’s student newspaper, the student visited riaa.stanford.edu (as directed in the article) and after entering his name, found that Stanford “has likely reported” his name to the RIAA, MPAA, or ESA. The student was both confused and worried– you see, after receiving his first copyright complaint a little while back, he hasn’t illegally downloaded a single song, movie or anything else! Has his computer been hacked? Did file-sharing somehow get accidentally enabled on his computer?

This truth is that this clever little stunt was part of the annual fake Daily published by the Stanford Chaparral (or the “Chappie” as it’s affectionately called), Stanford’s student humor magazine. The article is actually quite well-researched and well-written, including references to actual facts, such as the highly publicized “three strikes” policy” in which students not only face increasingly severe disciplinary actions for repeated DMCA violations and complaints, but are also charged increasing amounts of money through associated “reconnection fees.” The article also says that over thirty students have reached their third strike in the past year with settlements with the complaining record companies totaling over $100,000. While the numbers are about right– over thirty students and settlements totaling about $100,000 in the past year– they actually apply to the results of the record companies’ “pre-litigation letter” campaign that started in 2007 and in which they target college students all over the country with the threat of lawsuits. As part of the new “integrity initiative,” the article explains, Stanford is now scanning its network for DMCA violations and actively reports the culprits to the “RIAA and other appropriate authorities.” In the first day alone, the article continues, “78 unnamed students” have already been reported and the University’s IT organization “predicts that approximately 34% of Stanford undergraduates will be contacted by the end of Wednesday.” (That’s approximately 2,274 students.) The article goes on to direct students on how to find out if they’ve been flagged (via riaa.stanford.edu) and in turn, find legal help (the EFF gets a nod).

The article itself was pretty funny– Stanford, like other universities, has been spending increasing amounts of resources dealing with illegal file-sharing and copyright and personally, I think it was a good jab at how ludicrous the effects of the DMCA and intimidation tactics of the entertainment industry have become.* Just last week, I was summarizing the results from the annual undergraduate computing survey and many students commented on their dissatisfaction with the University’s handling of file-sharing and copyright issues, wishing Stanford would take a stronger stance against the RIAA and the MPAA’s efforts.

The website though… I don’t want to be a spoilsport, but aside from probably breaking some basic network usage policies (for setting up riaa.stanford.edu, use of the Stanford seal, etc.), the website took it a little too far. The reality is that since the first lawsuits targeting students (circa 2003), the University really has been stepping up their efforts to stop illegal file-sharing and punish repeat offenders and something like this initiative isn’t completely impossible. The reality is that over thirty Stanford students– peers and perhaps even friends of the Chappie staff members– really have been sent pre-litigation letters and really have had to pay approximately $100,000 in settlement deals. The reality is that the entertainment industry really is targeting college students– people who have little knowledge of their legal options and/or resources to defend themselves. When you enter your name and hit submit at riaa.stanford.edu, it looks like they use your name to randomly** give you either a thumbs up (you haven’t been reported) or thumbs down (you’ve already been reported and look forward to a letter in the next three to four weeks). I would hate to think that a student who’s already paid out thousands of dollars because of a pre-litigation letter was tricked into going to the website and got a thumbs down.

I don’t know how long the site will stay up and working, so if you’re curious, here are some screenshots, etc.:

• riaa.stanford.edu front page
• PDF copy of the online version of the article
• screenshot of the “you’ve been reported” message
• screenshot of the “you haven’t been reported” message

Notes:

* If you’re curious about Stanford’s actual policies on file-sharing and copyright, check out my department’s FAQ on File-Sharing & Copyright (also used by the General Counsel’s Office as well as the Information Security Office as the University’s “official” FAQ on the issue).

** It’s pseudorandom– the algorithm they’re using is deterministic. Unfortunately, no matter what Leland Stanford, Jr. does, he will always show up reported to the authorities.

You have no YouTube videos

Well, not quite, but within 24-48 hours of putting some of my blog videos on YouTube, two (out of five) clips were taken down for copyright infringement. Both were clips from The Daily Show– interestingly, I had anticipated copyright complaints, but after doing a search for Daily Show clips on YouTube, I saw that there were many that had survived the Viacom YouTube copyright sweep, so I thought I might slip by. Alas, not so much:

Perhaps they’re only actively monitoring new content now– those lazy bastards.

In any case, I’ll scrounge around and try to replace the clips.

Stanford Facebook Class: 10 Million in 10 Weeks

Stanford Facebook Course Final - Stanford World Domination
Originally uploaded by sindy

I’ve been working somewhat with, among others, the instructors (especially BJ Fogg and Dan Ackerman Greenberg) for the Stanford Facebook class CS377W: Creating Engaging Facebook Apps, figuring out how to use Facebook and its application development platform to encourage development of apps to promote student life, aid in teaching and learning, reach out to alumni, and more. (My department, Student Computing, is currently running an app contest to encourage development of just those kinds of apps.) Wednesday night, I attended the class final– a full-blown presentation on the class (including the journey from the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab exploring how to computerize persuasion in 1993 to the development of the class itself), aims of the course, lessons learned, and, most importantly, the apps produced by the class’ 25 student teams.

The class has gotten a lot of hype, especially in the blogosphere, and much of it has been about how students were looking to find the secret to building the next big app and, in turn, making big money from it (check out this WREX-TV, NBC11.com video and try not to be distracted by the dumbed-down and sometimes nonsensical tech imagery for the narration). Much of the class focused on metrics and taking advantage of the viral nature of social networking sites like Facebook– aiming, for each app, a high number of users (especially daily active users) and high engagement (number of page views and time spent with the app). The apps developed, as you can tell from the phrase “10 million in 10 weeks,” were largely successful in achieving these goals with over 10 million installs, over one miliion daily active users, and a handful ranking in Facebook’s top 100 apps (out of over 10,000): Perfect Match, Send Hotness, Hugs, and KissMe (originally based on the Full Moon on the Quad tradition at Stanford). (Sorry if I missed any that reached the top 100.)

However, focusing on getting the largest number of users doesn’t always result in developing the “deepest” or most “socially meaningful” applications– as one commenter put it, even the “Stanford intellectual elite [can be] devoted to producing such monumental drivel.” (Before the Stanford-developed KissMe app, just think of the success of the unbelievably simple Zombies app.) So, instead of focusing on the apps that had the highest number of users, I want to point out two apps that are particularly socially conscious and show how to take advantage of the power of the Facebook network:

• The Giving Tree - the developers of this app partnered with Kiva to piggy-back on the growing awareness of the power of microlending. Facebook users don’t even need to pony up their own money– instead, once 50 people have added one of the selected businesses to their profile, $25 is pushed to the business using money donated from companies.
• Save the Rainforest - here, the developers partnered with The Nature Conservancy to take advantage of some of the time Facebook users are spending on the site everyday. Users play a vocabulary game and for every six correct answers, one square foot of the rainforest will be adopted through The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre program. As of the class’s final presentation night (December 12, 2007), 5,000 square feet had already been saved!

You, like me, are probably trying to reduce the app clutter on your Facebook profile, but if you’re going to use apps, I think these two are certainly worth it.

And with that, I leave you with a short video of Dave McClure leading the audience in The Wave to get them psyched up for the presentations:

You have no (YouTube) Friends

I often embed YouTube videos when I post entries here (I’ve started collecting all posts with video into a single category), but from time to time, I post my own videos. While I used to directly upload my own video files, making both QuickTime and Windows Media Player versions available, with the advent and popularity of YouTube, I decided to start moving my videos there, thus creating my own YouTube channel.

Of course, although I don’t actually care about maintaining an active channel worthy of thousands of subscribers and followers, the sad part is that, in a big box, in big letters, the channel displays a list of your YouTube Friends and mine sadly says “You have no Friends.” That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?

Anyway, if you are more than a casual user on YouTube and want to be my friend (I can’t believe I’m actually writing this), please add me as a friend.

But you know, only if you want to.

Sad. So sad.

Blog facelift; Sites to checkout

If you have visited my site recently (as opposed to just reading off my feed), you’ll see that I’ve given the site a facelift– a new theme with some fancy AJAX stuff going on (which I may regret later) and some of my own tweaks for color, etc. I’ve also updated my blogroll to list some of the new blogs I’ve been reading lately:

• Confessions of a College Callgirl. I think the appeal here is self-explanatory, but particularly interesting tidbits lately: Blowjob Tutorial (try comparing notes to what’s in Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man), The Number is Eight, It Happened to Me!, and Workin’ for the Weekend. There usually isn’t art along with the posts that make it obviously NSFW, for tread carefully.
• David Byrne Journal. Aside from the awesomeness of Talking Heads and his continued work as a very talented musician (like being on the composing team that won the Oscar for Best Original Score in 1988 for The Last Emperor), he’s a talented and accomplished writer as well. His blog is both interesting and entertaining; the first post I read when I discovered it– Social “Hateworking”, IKEA– got me to subscribe right away.
• Overhead in New York. One of many “Overhead in…” sites (linked to from the NY site), but being a New York-er, this one appeals to and entertains me the most. Overheard in the Office is a pretty good second.
• Stephen Fry. There are so many reasons to love Stephen Fry, including his role as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster (probably the best screen adaptation of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories), A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and Blackadder (I know there’s an association-with-Hugh Laurie theme here). He’s only been blogging for a few months, but I love the way he writes (reflected well on screen in A Bit of Fry & Laurie) and he’s been blogging regularly since being asked to write a weekly tech column for The Guardian. He knows his tech, among many other things, and both techie and fuzzy can appreciate his posts. Check out his first column post, “Welcome to Dork Talk”, his hilarious review of smartphones, and his very well-written post on botnets.

Check ‘em out. (As if you didn’t already have RSS feeds to get through everyday.)

Amusing Google Search: “ragtotes”

If you go to Google and search for “ragtotes”, the Ragtotes website is appropriately the first result, but my Flickr photo of the Ragtotes Tampon holder is the second and my blog post about receiving it as SWAG is the third. The power of the Internet!

(This is similar to my first appearance as an amusing Google search result for “blog breasts.”)

Weirdest SWAG Ever: Ragtotes Tampon Holder

Ragtotes Tampon Holder
Originally uploaded by sindy

In the bag full of stuff at GHC, from Northwestern University Female Researchers in EECS– “At the Bleeding Edge.” We jokingly said it was a tampon holder, then we thought it was a pencil holder and then… we realized it’s right there on the box. It really is a tampon holder.

Wow.

At first I thought, a) “what corporate gift catalog do you find that in?” and b) “isn’t there collective agreement that we shouldn’t be referring to menstruation as ‘the rag’? Or is this some kind of female empowerment thing where we’re trying to claim that word back?”

Anyway, check it out: ragtotes.com.

If it’s not one thing, it’s another

This is from last week, but it’s an a propos post, considering I’m at GHC this week:

Transitions: Microsoft’s Sex Change

It’s great that Wallent’s colleagues are being so supportive, but I find it hard to believe that he won’t have to experience plain old sexism once he’s completely transitioned. I find that, more often than not, men– being, you know, men– think that it’s never as bad as women say and that we all live in more of a meritocracy than we really do.

Except, of course, when it comes to affirmative action. How convenient.